Pete Kazanjy
Author of Founding Sales, founder of Modern Sales Pros, co-founder of Atrium
Where to hear and read about Pete Kazanjy1 episode or test
Pete Kazanjy is a former product marketer who became a founder-seller, wrote Founding Sales, runs the Modern Sales Pros community and co-founded Atrium. The most useful idea from him: B2B founders should sell themselves until the motion repeats, then package it for two or three early sellers before scaling.
never mistake your lead gen for your business
Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)
Pete Kazanjy: the story and the lessons
1How Pete Kazanjy learned sales from the product side
Kazanjy came to sales from product, not from a BDR ladder. He started at VMware in product marketing and product management. In 2009 he started recruiting software company Talemetry, and Monster Worldwide acquired it in 2014.
The software did not sell itself, so he became its first seller and first sales leader. Most sales leaders rise from BDR to AE to manager; he did not.
He believes anyone can learn sales because he learned it without documentation. He never trained in sales. He learned it by doing it, researching it and repeating it.
He calls it "rocket surgery" at most, not rocket science. He says people who call selling magical or innate are talking their book.
He built the book and community around gaps he hit himself. Founding Sales is the book he wished he had, instead of learning from other founders' stories. Modern Sales Pros has about 30,000 sales operations people and sales leaders.
His current company, Atrium, makes data-driven sales management software. In 2016 and 2017 he was the expert on sales analytics, so he sold Atrium himself.
2Kazanjy's rules for founder-led sales
Kazanjy has founders sell to their first 20 to 30 customers themselves. Handing early selling to a third party is a game of telephone and loses the feedback on whether the message fits the market.
He cites Steve Blank's point that startups often fire their first VP of sales, and says that often happens because the founder skipped selling. "you just want to keep that in one brain to start then package it"
Founders only need to be non-zero at selling, not great. A founder gets minimally good at selling faster than an outsider gets expert in the product. Selling also teaches product, positioning and what to teach later hires.
B2B scales by adding sellers, each limited to 40 or 50 hours a week, so a motion that lives in one head cannot grow.
He hires the first seller only after a 15 to 25 percent win rate. The win rate should hold over about 50 to 100 at bats, not 2 wins from 10 meetings. Closing 1 of 30 first meetings is too inefficient unless deals are around $500,000.
His engineering metaphor: once it runs on your local machine without erroring out, check that it runs in the cloud.
He runs prospects in cohorts of 10 and learns between them. Ten first meetings show how discovery questions, slides and the demo land. Running 100 at once only tells you at the end whether it worked.
If prospects aren't moving forward, go back to the drawing board before the next batch. A prospect offering to introduce you to their boss is a good sign.
Kazanjy treats the sales motion like source code and updates it after every call. If a prospect asks something you can't answer, make a slide that handles the objection and show it next time. It takes dozens of these loops before the motion is repeatable.
He calls the repeatable motion a "selling while loop". "unfortunately there is no GitHub for sales motions"
He tracks stage conversions long before wins arrive. A healthy target is 7 of 10 first meetings reaching a second, about 4.5 reaching a third, and 2 or 3 winning. Atrium's stages are discovery, data light, preview, then a commercial discussion.
If second meetings don't happen, the message, targeting or pitch is off. He compares it to dating apps, where no matches means the profile picture needs work.
He expects big accounts to close on a later pass through the pipeline. With a 20 percent win rate, four of five deals don't close the first time. An Atrium seller ran three or four opportunities at Grin before landing it.
Grin now has about 100 SDRs and 80 AEs managed on Atrium. His lesson: "you just have to keep like pushing that boulder up the hill".
3How Kazanjy hires and ramps early sellers
Kazanjy hires two or three early-stage sellers, not a VP of sales. Look for sellers who sold the same persona at a similar price point at companies like Lever or Greenhouse, not recent joiners after the playbook was polished.
A VP who has scaled a company hasn't sold in a while and has no reason to redo the grind. He cites Jason Lemkin's joke that a VP who scaled Datadog or Figma has no reason to do it again at a crappy startup.
He hires the head of sales later, once sellers have proven the motion. The proof is the founder's own 25 percent win rate plus two sellers at about 20 percent, each closing $50,000 of bookings a month.
The right profile is someone not far from selling, like Marissa Fuhrer, who is willing to roll up her sleeves. The ask is then "all I need you to do is scale it up".
He judges a hire only after handing over the full kit. The kit is the slide deck, written discovery questions and a demo script. The founder should first have closed 20 or 30 deals with arm's-length buyers; friends and family don't count.
Poor win rates or activity despite the kit point to the person, not the process. Hire two sellers so one failure isn't ambiguous, and avoid more than three or four.
He reads each new hire month by month on leading indicators. Month one is onboarding with mock discovery, mock demos and ride-alongs. Month two should bring about 10 first meetings with half reaching a second, and month three some proposals.
No first meetings on the calendar within a month means it isn't working. Proposals build confidence but don't prove success until money closes. The worst case is learning at nine months what the indicators showed at two.
He keeps junior sellers in the office while the motion is young. A manager sitting beside three or four reps can correct each call as it ends. Reviewing recordings once a day is too slow.
He says remote work has cost a generation of junior reps their skills, like 24-year-olds who never trained among ten peers. Once the motion is baked, remote may work.
He screens candidates with a written Google doc of about a dozen questions. The questions are biographical, such as something you built and are proud of. About half of applicants never finish it.
It shows who is serious, who tells a clear story and who pays attention to detail. He uses it at Atrium and across his portfolio companies.
4What Kazanjy knows about how selling works
Kazanjy sells as a consultant and turns away poor fits. He uses discovery questions to show a prospect their current approach is costly, then shows a better way. He rejects "selling ice to an Eskimo".
Atrium suits teams of about 10 to 300 sellers, so he won't sell to a company with one seller, who would only churn and waste customer success resources.
He wants the ICP and personas crisp before scaling outreach. Define the account that buys and the people inside it: users, technical buyers and the budget owner.
For Amplitude, he says the ICP is a software company with at least a couple of product managers. The budget owner may be the VP of product, VP of engineering or CTO, so plan who to reach after the first conversation.
He says self-serve products still need sales to reach big contracts. Users paying $19 or $29 a month are great, but $50,000 to $250,000 contracts need a conversation with the budget holder. Snowflake has roughly 500 salespeople.
Dropbox never built product for selling across a whole organization, and Slack nearly missed it too before adding sales leaders.
He trains rapport on strangers, the way a pianist drills scales. He calls it "turbo rapport": quickly befriending bartenders, flight attendants or baristas. Open with a compliment, never the weather.
Other scales are follow-up questions, uncomfortable questions, and asking for money then staying quiet until they answer. He says he can now talk to anyone in an elevator.
He sees modern sales as a measurable discipline, like baseball after Moneyball. CRMs, email, calendar, phone and Zoom record what sellers do, so behavior can be measured and improved. Product analytics made the same move from licking a finger to Mixpanel to Amplitude.
He draws on The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (sales teams as revenue factories) and Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself: control your actions, not the scoreboard.
Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)
B2B founders should sell themselves until they have a repeatable sales motion, then package it for a few junior sellers before scaling. The episode gives concrete thresholds (15 to 25 percent win rate, 50 to 100 at bats) and leading indicators for knowing when to hire and whether a hire is working.
Kazanjy came to sales from product, not from a BDR ladder. He started at VMware in product marketing and product management. In 2009 he started recruiting software company Talemetry, and Monster Worldwide acquired it in 2014.
The software did not sell itself, so he became its first seller and first sales leader. Most sales leaders rise from BDR to AE to manager; he did not.
He believes anyone can learn sales because he learned it without documentation. He never trained in sales. He learned it by doing it, researching it and repeating it.
He calls it "rocket surgery" at most, not rocket science. He says people who call selling magical or innate are talking their book.
He built the book and community around gaps he hit himself. Founding Sales is the book he wished he had, instead of learning from other founders' stories. Modern Sales Pros has about 30,000 sales operations people and sales leaders.
His current company, Atrium, makes data-driven sales management software. In 2016 and 2017 he was the expert on sales analytics, so he sold Atrium himself.
Kazanjy has founders sell to their first 20 to 30 customers themselves. Handing early selling to a third party is a game of telephone and loses the feedback on whether the message fits the market.
He cites Steve Blank's point that startups often fire their first VP of sales, and says that often happens because the founder skipped selling. "you just want to keep that in one brain to start then package it"
Founders only need to be non-zero at selling, not great. A founder gets minimally good at selling faster than an outsider gets expert in the product. Selling also teaches product, positioning and what to teach later hires.
B2B scales by adding sellers, each limited to 40 or 50 hours a week, so a motion that lives in one head cannot grow.
He hires the first seller only after a 15 to 25 percent win rate. The win rate should hold over about 50 to 100 at bats, not 2 wins from 10 meetings. Closing 1 of 30 first meetings is too inefficient unless deals are around $500,000.
His engineering metaphor: once it runs on your local machine without erroring out, check that it runs in the cloud.
He runs prospects in cohorts of 10 and learns between them. Ten first meetings show how discovery questions, slides and the demo land. Running 100 at once only tells you at the end whether it worked.
If prospects aren't moving forward, go back to the drawing board before the next batch. A prospect offering to introduce you to their boss is a good sign.
Kazanjy treats the sales motion like source code and updates it after every call. If a prospect asks something you can't answer, make a slide that handles the objection and show it next time. It takes dozens of these loops before the motion is repeatable.
He calls the repeatable motion a "selling while loop". "unfortunately there is no GitHub for sales motions"
He tracks stage conversions long before wins arrive. A healthy target is 7 of 10 first meetings reaching a second, about 4.5 reaching a third, and 2 or 3 winning. Atrium's stages are discovery, data light, preview, then a commercial discussion.
If second meetings don't happen, the message, targeting or pitch is off. He compares it to dating apps, where no matches means the profile picture needs work.
He expects big accounts to close on a later pass through the pipeline. With a 20 percent win rate, four of five deals don't close the first time. An Atrium seller ran three or four opportunities at Grin before landing it.
Grin now has about 100 SDRs and 80 AEs managed on Atrium. His lesson: "you just have to keep like pushing that boulder up the hill".
Kazanjy hires two or three early-stage sellers, not a VP of sales. Look for sellers who sold the same persona at a similar price point at companies like Lever or Greenhouse, not recent joiners after the playbook was polished.
A VP who has scaled a company hasn't sold in a while and has no reason to redo the grind. He cites Jason Lemkin's joke that a VP who scaled Datadog or Figma has no reason to do it again at a crappy startup.
He hires the head of sales later, once sellers have proven the motion. The proof is the founder's own 25 percent win rate plus two sellers at about 20 percent, each closing $50,000 of bookings a month.
The right profile is someone not far from selling, like Marissa Fuhrer, who is willing to roll up her sleeves. The ask is then "all I need you to do is scale it up".
He judges a hire only after handing over the full kit. The kit is the slide deck, written discovery questions and a demo script. The founder should first have closed 20 or 30 deals with arm's-length buyers; friends and family don't count.
Poor win rates or activity despite the kit point to the person, not the process. Hire two sellers so one failure isn't ambiguous, and avoid more than three or four.
He reads each new hire month by month on leading indicators. Month one is onboarding with mock discovery, mock demos and ride-alongs. Month two should bring about 10 first meetings with half reaching a second, and month three some proposals.
No first meetings on the calendar within a month means it isn't working. Proposals build confidence but don't prove success until money closes. The worst case is learning at nine months what the indicators showed at two.
He keeps junior sellers in the office while the motion is young. A manager sitting beside three or four reps can correct each call as it ends. Reviewing recordings once a day is too slow.
He says remote work has cost a generation of junior reps their skills, like 24-year-olds who never trained among ten peers. Once the motion is baked, remote may work.
He screens candidates with a written Google doc of about a dozen questions. The questions are biographical, such as something you built and are proud of. About half of applicants never finish it.
It shows who is serious, who tells a clear story and who pays attention to detail. He uses it at Atrium and across his portfolio companies.
Kazanjy sells as a consultant and turns away poor fits. He uses discovery questions to show a prospect their current approach is costly, then shows a better way. He rejects "selling ice to an Eskimo".
Atrium suits teams of about 10 to 300 sellers, so he won't sell to a company with one seller, who would only churn and waste customer success resources.
He wants the ICP and personas crisp before scaling outreach. Define the account that buys and the people inside it: users, technical buyers and the budget owner.
For Amplitude, he says the ICP is a software company with at least a couple of product managers. The budget owner may be the VP of product, VP of engineering or CTO, so plan who to reach after the first conversation.
He says self-serve products still need sales to reach big contracts. Users paying $19 or $29 a month are great, but $50,000 to $250,000 contracts need a conversation with the budget holder. Snowflake has roughly 500 salespeople.
Dropbox never built product for selling across a whole organization, and Slack nearly missed it too before adding sales leaders.
He trains rapport on strangers, the way a pianist drills scales. He calls it "turbo rapport": quickly befriending bartenders, flight attendants or baristas. Open with a compliment, never the weather.
Other scales are follow-up questions, uncomfortable questions, and asking for money then staying quiet until they answer. He says he can now talk to anyone in an elevator.
He sees modern sales as a measurable discipline, like baseball after Moneyball. CRMs, email, calendar, phone and Zoom record what sellers do, so behavior can be measured and improved. Product analytics made the same move from licking a finger to Mixpanel to Amplitude.
He draws on The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (sales teams as revenue factories) and Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself: control your actions, not the scoreboard.